Summary of Poster Session: James Morrison explained how he uses podcasts to record his lectures so that after class, students can review the lectures. “Students can double check difficult, complicated concepts; Overcome language barriers; Get Missed Material. ** Note: My podcasting had no noticeable influence on lecture attendance! **“. Additionally, anyone from around the world can listen to his lectures. The lectures can be found on his course website: http://sites.middlebury.edu/ipespring09/

How to Podcast:

(1) Record the Audio
(2) Upload the Audio
(3) Publicize the files’ location

Technologies:

]]>http://sites.middlebury.edu/teachwithtech/2009/06/19/podcasting-lectures-prof-james-morrison/feed/0Using Second Life for Political Simulation – Prof. Quinn Mechamhttp://sites.middlebury.edu/teachwithtech/2009/06/19/using-second-life-for-political-simulation-prof-quinn-mecham/
http://sites.middlebury.edu/teachwithtech/2009/06/19/using-second-life-for-political-simulation-prof-quinn-mecham/#commentsFri, 19 Jun 2009 14:57:09 +0000http://sites.middlebury.edu/teachwithtech/?p=5Continue reading →]]>Technologies Used: Second Life; Blogs, Wikis.Course:
Political Science 103: Intro to Comparative PoliticsNumber of Students: 50Objectives: “Provide a political simulation experience for my students, and conduct an experiment to determine if it was possible to create a virtual state in which people would actively participate.”

Summary of Poster Session: Quinn Mecham and Alex Russo (a student from his course) demonstrated how they used Second Life as one of their tools to simulate how political parties and governments form. Students had avatars (simulated characters) in Second Life that could interact with each other and campaign, form parties, propose legislation, and experience how politics play out. A blog and wiki connected to their virtual space was also used to allow proposals to be vetted.

Actual Learning Outcomes: “Students learned the effects of different types of electoral systems on political outcomes. They also learned how to test their own political ideology, form political parties, create political platforms, choose between competing parties, draft and vote on legislation.”

Conclusions and Reflections: “While some students were averse to using the technology, many were active participants in the simulation and enjoyed it very much. I believe that the simulation greatly enriched students’ understanding of different types of democracy than what is found in the United States. I am not yet convinced that second life is the best possible platform for this experiment, but it was the best platform we could find without developing our own from scratch.”

Caveats to Colleagues: “It is largely a positive experience, but requires high levels of support and faculty investment to make it work successfully.”

Summary of Poster Session: David Rosenberg and several of his students showed the website that is a resource for students in David’s class as well as the world. Students helped identify content to link to and contributed content themselves, such as maps.

Anticipated learning outcomes: “Research project reports worth publishing beyond the classroom.”Actual learning outcomes: “a 5-star internet resource on the South China Sea .”Conclusions and Reflections: “This is an on-going process of building a network of interested students, scholars and policy-makers.”Will you use this technology again ?: Not necessarily. If so, what would you do differently?: Rss feeds and blogs to facilitate dialog

Summary: “My winter term class “Deconstructing Discrimination” carried out an empirical research project to examine whether retail gasoline prices are correlated with the racial and income characteristics of neighborhoods. The project required obtaining, manipulating, and combining data from a variety of sources. We purchased gasoline price data from Oil Price International (OPIS), used ArcGIS to identify the census tract for each station, and then obtained neighborhood characteristics from the 2000 Decennial Census using Geolytics software. Finally, the students also conducted telephone surveys of the stations to collect information on station characteristics. We used Stata software to combine all of these data sets and to perform the analysis.”

Learning Outcomes: “The students, many of whom were early in their college careers, experienced the challenges of conducting original research and gained an overview of data sets, several types of software, and statistical analysis techniques. The resulting paper “Retail Redlining: Are Gasoline Prices Higher in Poor and Minority Neighborhoods” will be coauthored with four students and submitted to a scholarly journal for potential publication.”

Recommendation to Colleagues: “Although this was a winter term class and did not have formal “labs,” I found it to be helpful to hold class in the computer lab often so that we could all work together. The students also worked in groups, and I made certain that each group had a similar distribution of backgrounds and at least one member who had extensive prior experience with Stata.